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[ARTC] Measuring for action vs Measuring for reporting #30

Open zanete opened 1 year ago

zanete commented 1 year ago

Description: An article that talks about measuring for action vs measuring for reporting Scope of work:

Greenhouse Gas Protocol is designed to measure for reporting SCI designed to measuring for action This is a new concept, the article will be defining these terms.

ESTIMATED DEADLINE: Feb 2024

ursvill commented 1 year ago

GHG protocol, measuring GHG emissions why SCI if there is GHG protocol already? for reporting GHGP is ok, but for developers does not help; they need to measure for action; meaning enabling them to take action and reduce emissions.

ursvill commented 1 year ago

Reaching out to my former client NBS to see how they write their thought pieces / content.

As far as I know, NBS is in contact with universities, academics and other SME that write content for them. I wonder in how far we can use the systems that they apply to curate content.

https://nbs.net/

ursvill commented 1 year ago

put on hold for now, until we have a content PM

NAMRATA-WOKE commented 1 year ago

@zanete we might want to show this as Parked. Don't see it as an option for Content at the moment.

NAMRATA-WOKE commented 1 year ago

Resurfacing this because this is what IEF is all about and we can elaborate on this project and use it to share our focus: action over reporting.

@jawache i think you, Urs and I should have a separate call about this because it would be a great way to build more interest in this project and prepare people for culture shift that's coming (if we have anything to say about it!)

NAMRATA-WOKE commented 10 months ago

NEXT STEPS

srini1978 commented 10 months ago

Measurement for Reporting: Measurement for reporting typically uses GHG standards and the standards focus on calculation of total emissions. Hence reporting provides an absolute number for carbon emissions from software. The output would be something like: Organization A has about 50 Metric Tonnes from software carbon emissions in H2 of 2023 and the organization is setting a target to reduce this by 15% by H1 of 2024 and this is across all of their entire portfolio of business applications.

Armed with this information, it would not be possible for development teams to put plans in place to reduce emission numbers. Every business app would have different levels of complexity and usage and hence it is important to qualify this metric.

Measurement for Action: Developers should have metrices that are actionable, and they need to also have them at a level of a software component.

For example, consider a 3-tier application that has a front-end web app, middle tier API and a backend relational or NoSQL db. If we would like to start measuring the carbon emissions from this application and need to plan for reduction, we need to have these numbers available at each tier - Database, API and front end. Each of these tiers correspond to a software component and with the Software Carbon Intensity specification (SCI), we could measure the emissions from these components individually. All these components together form what is called the Software Boundary.

Impact Framework (IF) is an implementation tool for the SCI spec. In the Impact Framework context, these tiers correspond to nodes and all the nodes roll up to something called graph.

At a node level., we will have telemetry or observations like CPU utilization, storage size, memory utilization which represent the electricity drawn from power sources. The higher the utilization of the database or VM, the higher the electricity drawn and since carbon is directly proportional to electricity drawn or energy, higher is the carbon emissions.

Hence by using the impact framework, one can plan carbon emission reduction strategies at component level and hence the strategies become actionable. Some of these strategies are defined as part of the Green Software Patterns and they follow the 3 principles of Sustainable software engineering namely energy efficiency, hardware efficiency and carbon efficiency.

srini1978 commented 10 months ago

@NAMRATA-WOKE have taken a first stab at it. Will continue to iterate.

NAMRATA-WOKE commented 9 months ago

@Green-Software-Foundation/ief-leads please chime in.

jawache commented 9 months ago

Measurement for reporting is asking the question "what number can I defend".

Measurement for action is asking the question "what number drives the most elimination of emissions".

They are both very important. We're not throwing shade on reporting or the GHG, we just want the conversation to recognise there are multiple reasons to measure and it's not a one size fits all.

One example is that for a cloud provider they might actually record every single server in a data center as having consuming the same amount of energy, which works from an accounting/regulatory reporting perspective, and ensuring there is no double counting. But then destroys any incentive developers have to eliminate energy consumption.

On a similar front most of the cloud providers carbon dashboards provide delayed energy data, sometimes many month delayed. This is because that is the only data that an auditor will approve for verifying those numbers are correct from a regulatory reporting perspective but again, delayed data, does not work for driving behavior to eliminate emissions.

That's why when creating the software carbon intensity specification a big driver for that team was measurement for action. The software carbon the intensity specification doesn't allow use of offsets or any form of renewable energy credits to reduce your score, only eliminatios can reduce your score. If you allow/encourage offsets that's where behavior is driven. By not allowing offsets of any form the behavior we're driving iin the SCI s to actually eliminate the emissions at source, to actually not emit, not consume energy in the first place. Instead of being able to consume energy, and then offsetting that energy consumption with some financial contract like a renewable energy credit.

NAMRATA-WOKE commented 8 months ago

To be completed latest by March 18, 2024

zanete commented 7 months ago

Reconsidered as not crucial for the Hackathon, so postponed as a result

bhubonpothik commented 2 months ago

If we can bring the real time carbon emission calculator for cloud that Adrian is driving along with SCI we can show both the top Down (reporting) and Bottom Up (action) approach to emission measurment.